


Salvage

by orphan_account



Series: before. [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Omnic Crisis, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-13
Updated: 2016-09-13
Packaged: 2018-08-14 21:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8029147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Build 'em up, Torbjörn thought wryly. Break 'em down.
There was the slam of the door opening again and if he were a lesser man, he would have taken delight in the way the blond jolted. Children. They had sent children to deal with their mistakes.
Or, a character study of everyone's favourite fighting Swede: Toblerone Lint-Poem.





	Salvage

**Author's Note:**

> roughly, because fuck canon: jack is 25, reyes is 26, ana is 30, torb is 31 and reinhardt is 32.

"Quite simply put: we're desperate," the woman said, voice quiet and serious. They've been at this for twenty-five minutes already and it was only then that Torbjörn finally nodded to show that he was listening. There it was, _finally_. That little nugget of hope that maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea to let her into his home.

Then, she lost his interest again. Whatever sort of directness she had was quickly subsumed by more bullshit honey sweetness.

 _Oh, but Mr. Lindholm, the world is ending!_ , she didn’t say because she had much more grace and deserved more respect for being able to continue on despite his attempts to shake her form. 

 _It’s a desperate situation. Your expertise could very well level the playing field_.

She kept repeating that word. _Desperate_. She used a lot of other words too. Big ones that he understood just fine, but didn't bother to correct her assumption of him. It was all in painfully _polite_ Swedish, of course. He didn't expect anything different.   


Pah, as if the world wasn’t _always_  ending. The Omnics were just accelerating that process.

( He had warned them. )

His thoughts drifted back to her handshake. She had a crushing grip. It was solid and strong and if she had wanted to, Torbjörn didn’t doubt she could have snapped his fingers. It was all about pressure and the application of it, after all. She had controlled the pace and Torbjörn didn’t even try to wrestle it from her.

 _What does she know about physics_ , he wondered seriously. These were the sort of thoughts that concerned him. Education. Math. _Philosophy_ , despite him never having read anything from So-crates in his life. _And what’s her opinion on Schrödinger's cat?_

Torbjörn looked at the agent's hands, frown twisting his lips even further. He had remembered how rough her palms were. They did tend to start awfully young. 

 _Children_ , he thought, _were too eager_. Adults were too unfeeling. It was a sad thought, but Torbjörn was very good at thinking sad thoughts.

He raised a hand. She closed her mouth, eyes narrowed and already appraising him.

This was where it shifted.

"You've got all of one minute," he said, carefully, "-to make as good of a point as you can." 

He watched as a spark finally glittered in the youth's eye. _Premature victory_ , Torbjörn identified. Were he capable of such notions, he might have pondered what it felt like to be young again.

* * *

The chairs were tall. 

Torbjörn sized them up quickly before seating himself. He tested its weight, shifting his distribution around and feeling how the chair swayed, creaked, bent and groaned. He amused himself for the following minutes as he waited.

It felt strange to be in such a large hall. It was suffocating. It was too much to be anything but unnecessary and he hated grandeur for the sake of looking _impressive_. Torbjörn mumbled something rude to himself, watching as two pairs of eyes snapped to him before returning to their listless staring. He felt very comfortable in his loose-fitting gear, so he took a stroke of victory as he watched the guard detail swelter in the heat. 

He didn't know what to expect from this meeting. His reason for coming was very different than the one he gave them. Torbjörn was quite invested in the world. He'd rather not see it go, but at the same time, he hated people. 

He hated _a lot_ of people. 

He _did_ warn them, he thought ( again ) because he was feeling particularly vindictive. The least they could do was be on time. 

He settled down again and no sooner than he did, the door swung open. Torbjörn lifted his head to take in the fresh faces. 

In walked another United Nations agent. Another one of those bland ones who had voices that could easily be forgotten and a face that was so generic it looked like they peeled it from an assembly line. Beside them were two men. Both were large, broad-shouldered people that cut two _very_ different forms against the frame of the door. 

The first was a pale-skinned blond with a carefully neutral face. He was observant, blue eyes already taking in the entire room and Torbjörn had no doubt the blond could identify where every security camera was situated. The other man had skin the colour of the earth and a dark expression already affixed on his features. 

He looked angry.  


They both looked too young for this sort of stuff. 

What tipped their scales? The kind of people who took this offer weren’t people who were motivated by glory, fame or money. Saving the world was a lot more fickle than the stories made it out to be. It was less “saving” and more _salvaging_. 

_Build 'em up_ , Torbjörn thought wryly. _Break 'em down_. 

There was the slam of the door opening again and if he were a lesser man, he would have taken delight in the way the blond _jolted_. Children. They had sent _children_ to deal with their mistakes.

The other one had twitched at the sound, but gave nothing else away.

Immediately, Torbjörn knew which of the two was more dangerous. 

A loud and boisterous voice filled the room and Torbjörn lingered on the two a moment longer before turning his attention to the newest member, mouth already open to tell the man to _shut the hell up_. 

Which he did. In Swedish, no less, because he hated how English softened his words. 

The new man was much larger than everyone else present and his physical volume was still insufficient to describe just how he _overwhelmed_ the room. He was tall. _Very_ tall. He had a voice like storm clouds and a single eye that was clear of any obstruction. Where the corresponding eye should be was instead a sensitive-looking scar that stretched down his entire face. The criss-cross pattern that made Torbjörn curious. As did how fresh it still seemed to be. 

He also wondered how many tankards of drink the man could down in a second. There were many things Torbjörn would very much like to find out.  


( Like what the man looked like trying to duck underneath doorways. While drunk. That would be an _extremely_ productive use of their time. ) 

"Reinhardt Wilhelm," the man introduced himself as he slapped a meaty hand on the blond's back. The blond, to his credit, held strong. He smiled, and it was a bright expression. 

"John Morrison, but please call me Jack." 

Reinhardt grinned and turned to face Torbjörn. Then in the loudest German he had ever heard, he proceeded to challenge Torbjörn to a drinking competition. He left an open space for Torbjörn to fill in with his name, which he did so proudly. Then Torbjörn continued with a thinly veiled insult. That too, was in Swedish because Reinhardt seemed to understand him. Reinhardt’s grin grew wider and he laughed.

Then a cough gathered their attention and they turned to look at the female figure who was _also_ in the room. Torbjörn didn't remember seeing her there before. 

Just to check, he looked at the dark-haired man ( he hovered at Jack’s side and they stood very close together ) who still hadn't introduced himself. Sure enough, the man's eyes were pointedly  _trained_ on the female. It was a terrifying gaze. Those burnt umber hues were blistering with such a vivid intensity that it was a wonder that the female didn’t immediately burst into flame. He was probably the only one to have noticed her entering going by Jack's twitching finger and Reinhardt's plain surprise. 

The female smiled. 

Triggering spontaneous human combustion, sadly, wasn’t a power that the man possessed. Though, judging by how she looked utterly untroubled, Torbjörn wasn’t sure fire was going to be enough.

He wasn’t sure who was more dangerous now and that thought alone left him feeling unsettled.

"Ana Amari," she introduced herself. She also very deliberately didn’t acknowledge how the dark-haired man’ stared.

Reinhardt was immediately intrigued. He was also keen enough to not repeat his name. Jack watched her before asking her something that Torbjörn couldn’t hear. The three lapsed into a conversation and he felt inclined to stand up and join them, but he waited. 

There was something about _all_ of them that they shared. Something similar in the way they walked in here, the way they greeted themselves and said their names. Their voices held a note of importance, not the self-imposed kind per se, but something _definite_  and familiar. There was something missing too. Torbjörn was good at identifying missing parts, see. He knew how things fitted together.

There was something else that _should_ be there in order to successfully reinforce that sense of importance. For reasons he didn't understand yet, they all chose to leave it out. 

The only one left to introduce himself broke away from the party at the door and seated himself down across from Torbjörn. With his seat, he could look at all of them and meet all of their eyes with ease.

Torbjörn considered throwing an apple at him. _Newton_ , and all that, but there was something else he wanted to test.  


The man looked directly at Torbjörn, like he could hear his thoughts. Then he looked at Reinhardt, then Ana, then Jack, and then everyone else in the room. It was this very slow and deliberate sweep across that everyone could have been missed because he didn’t move. He didn’t shift his head, but Torbjörn was certain the man had evaluated the agents, in great detail, standing guard behind him. 

_Well_ , Torbjörn decided as a sudden stone sunk into his gut. _This was going to be fun_.

**Author's Note:**

> toblerone is a _very_ interesting dude. he thinks everyone else is interesting too ( which he's 99% sure is code for "fucked up" ). i like to think the founders are a collection of very broken people who are about the get even more broken because the omnic crisis was very rough. torb's beginning to understand this too, but not yet. that comes later. 
> 
> also, everything is 50% more fun when you dissect characters from outside perspectives. i don't know if everyone is going to have a solo fic that explores their own impressions of their fellow teammates, but we'll see. i hope you guys are enjoying these!


End file.
